Virgin Atlantic flight from Orlando is the first-ever to run on synthetic fuel

A Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 took off from Orlando bound for London earlier this month, powered by synthetic jet fuel. Its prime ingredient was exhaust from a Chinese steel mill, which was turned into ethanol and rendered at a Georgia refinery into jet fuel.

The Orlando Sentinel spoke with Freya Burton, chief sustainability and people officer at LanzaTech, a next-generation fuels company based in Illinois that produced what powered the Virgin airplane.

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The flight was selected because of a years-long partnership between LanzaTech and Virgin, which has multiple departures daily from Orlando.

It’s not jet fuel made from kerosene as we know it. It’s a synthetic version that we have made from other feedstocks.

How do you make it?

Steel plants need coal to reduce the iron to make steel. They use the coal as a chemical agent so even if your steel plant is powered by solar power, you still need coal to make the steel. So you’ve got this waste emission that is either burned or flared, so it just goes out into the atmosphere. Or it is combusted to make heat and power. But it’s quite inefficient making power from these gases. So steel mills are looking at what else to do with these gases. What we can do is ferment these gases. If you think about traditional fermentation, which is sugars and yeast to make alcohol, we actually take the gases and a bacteria, and this bacteria eats the gases as its food source. As it consumes the gas, it grows and as it grows, it produces ethanol.

And then what?

That’s the first step. The second step is what do you do with that ethanol. You could turn it into plastics. You could turn it into road-transport fuels. And now you can turn it into jet fuel, which is a technology that we developed, with the Pacific Northwest Lab, a U.S. Department of Energy Lab. We scaled up and now we can take ethanol from any source but in this case we use ethanol from recycled steel emissions and we’ve converted it into jet fuel.

How polluting is it?

When flying aircraft emit various pollutants, where they are most visible is contrails, the white, cloud-like tracks across the sky. Impurities in the exhaust, some formed through the combustion of aromatics and sulfur compounds, serve as sites for water droplets to gather, forming ice particles that compose a contrail. LanzaTech’s fuel has almost no sulfur and no aromatics.

Virgin Atlantic plane gets LanzaTech fuel. (Doug Peters / PA)

What are the climate-changing carbon emissions?

Initial analysis suggests LanzaTech will create a jet fuel with the potential to achieve more than 70 percent lower CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) emissions than conventional jet fuel and there are few or no land, food or water competition issues associated with this approach.

Why Virgin?

We have been working with Virgin Atlantic since about 2010 or 2011. They approached us looking for the next stage of sustainable fuels for aviation and they liked our approach because we are using non-food, non-land based resources to make fuels. They really embraced this idea of using waste to make jet fuel.

How much of your fuel was in that Virgin 747 flight?

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There were roughly 25,000 gallons of fuel on the flight. About 5 percent was LanzaTech fuel from recycled waste emissions.

Only 5 percent?

It was a commercial flight that we called a proving flight to show that this is possible and it went really well. The only reason we couldn’t put more fuel in is because we don’t have enough fuel made yet.

How does it compare in price?

All new types of fuels are going to have to compete with the price of oil, and we reckon that it would be competitive with oil at about $80 a barrel. That’s competing with fossil jet [fuel], with regular kerosene that is being used in flight. Our point here is that all sustainable fuels should be treated equally because otherwise you are not only competing against the price of fossil but you also are competing against each other, with some being given additional benefits.

In the journey of the fuel, the ethanol came from a steel mill in China and it was shipped to the U.S., to the Freedom Pines Biorefinery in Georgia and that is where we converted it into jet fuel. And then it was transported in a truck to Orlando and that’s where it was blended with the regular fossil jet.

What’s your path to sustained production?

We have commercialized that ethanol-from-waste-gas process and that’s operating a commercial scale in China now. We have five other projects to make waste emissions into ethanol around the world.

And the ethanol conversion?

We are now looking at building a facility here in the United States in Georgia that would have the ability to make 10 million gallons a year of jet fuel from any source of ethanol. That’s the next step, and we have to have that up and running by 2020. We are also working on three more sites for 30 million gallons of jet fuel in Europe as well in the next three years.